Leaders from three of the city’s public safety agencies gathered at Truman College in the Uptown neighborhood Monday night to lay out their high-level goals for the coming year.
But the presentations from the heads of the Chicago Police Department, the Civilian Office of Police Accountability and the Chicago Police Board were delivered as the future of one of those bodies, the police board, is shrouded in uncertainty.
CPD Superintendent Larry Snelling used the gathering, held by the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability, to double-down on his commitment to transparency, even as the future of police discipline cases is in flux.
For six decades, the nine-person police board has handed down discipline to CPD officers found guilty in the most serious misconduct cases — those that call for an officer to be suspended for at least a year or fired from the department.
But earlier this year, Edwin Benn, the arbitrator overseeing contract negotiations between the city and Fraternal Order of Police Lodge 7, ruled that CPD officers accused of serious misconduct have the right to choose whether their cases are decided by a third party or by the police board.
Proceedings decided by a third party would not be open to the public, and an attorney for the FOP filed a motion earlier this year to remove 22 pending cases from the police board’s docket, but that effort was shot down.
Mayor Brandon Johnson called for the City Council to split the contract vote into two — one for the contract’s economic package, which would provide a roughly 20% raise to officers over four years, and another for the disciplinary award handed down by Benn months earlier.
The City Council’s Workforce Development Committee last week voted unanimously to recommend that the full council approve the economic package, but the committee voted 10-5 against recommending the disciplinary award’s approval. The full council is scheduled to cast both votes Wednesday.
Snelling said for his part he will be forthcoming on public issues.
“I’ll be open and honest about any and every single thing we do because we’ve got nothing to hide,” Snelling said. “If we’re wrong, I’m going to say we’re wrong. But when we’re right, I’m going to stand up and say that we’re right.”
Snelling, still in the early part of his tenure as the city’s police boss, again urged a collaborative approach to reducing the city’s crime, but noted that there is no citywide, one-size-fits-all solution.
“We cannot have one singular public safety plan for the entire city,” Snelling said. “Each district has its own set of issues. We have districts where we have impoverishment. We have districts that are more well-off than others. We have districts that are just loaded with businesses. We have to address each individual problem in each district. I cannot provide one strategy that will go citywide and be effective. So we have to make sure that we have a focus on what our communities need and what each one of our communities asks for.”
Andrea Kersten, COPA’s chief administrator, told the commission that the agency will focus in 2024 on consistency, timeliness, transparency, youth engagement and equity.
The mood inside the Truman College auditorium grew tense for a few minutes when outgoing Chicago Police Board President Ghian Foreman fielded questions from the Rev. Beth Brown, one of the members of the Community Commission for Public Safety and Accountability.
After Foreman laid out the police board’s goals — which largely described the board’s long-standing operating procedures — Brown told Foreman that she was “underwhelmed” by the board’s stated benchmarks for 2024.
She then asked Foreman, “Why did you ignore your commissioners’ input on where they thought your goals should go?”
Foreman told Brown that the input was not ignored, but that CCPSA commissioners needed more explanation as to how the board functions.
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“We had to explain how our work is actually done,” Foreman told Brown. “If you want the truth, I was quite underwhelmed as well because I really didn’t think these were goals. I didn’t think that these were necessarily actionable, but you wanted five goals, so we tried to give you five goals.”
As the meeting concluded, Yvette Loizon, another CCPSA commissioner, thanked Foreman for his service as president. The next president of the police board is expected to be confirmed this week, according to a source familiar with the decision.